In Part 1 of How I Edit in Lightroom I talked about my typical routine for all of my photos. Sunsets and landscapes take a few extra steps that I wanted to share with you. For the photos I am including in this post I shot them on the darker side knowing that I would be able to bring out the details but upping the shadows. It’s always my goal to shoot a little on the darker side rather than over-exposing. When you are shooting in raw (which I suggest doing) it’s much easier to lighten the photo during editing than it is to bring a photo back if it is over-exposed.

In a situation like this photo where the sky is bright but the trees and sidewalks are dark I use the Adjustment Brush tool to edit. I showed the location of the brush tool in the red square, and the red highlights on the photos are to show you the areas that I used the brush. I painted the brush over the sky portion of the photo. This allows me to only edit the portion of the photo that has been painted.

You can adjust the size of the brush, the feather, density, etc. I try to keep the size of the brush as small as possible so that I can be more detailed. You can see from the example photo that I brought the exposure down to bring out the detail of the clouds. I also increased the saturation and gave the sky a pink hue.

For the overall photo, I brought the shadows up and increased the contrast. Whenever I am shooting trees or water that has ripples I like to increase the clarity to give the photo more sharpness. When bumping up the color I prefer to use the vibrance rather than add too much saturation. I think that vibrance keeps the photo looking more natural.

If there are certain colors that I want to highlight more I will use the HSL/Color/B&W bar on the right side. In the examples below I wanted the reds to have more luminance and be a little more saturated than the other colors in the photo. This is also where you can change the hue. Some of the VSCO presets can alter the colors, for example my reds have a more orange hue. I can move the red bar back towards the left to make it a truer red.

Those are a few of my tips on how to edit in Lightroom. On another note, these photos are from Little Venice in London which was such a charming neighborhood. We had dinner at The Summerhouse (pictured above) which is located on the water. It’s definitely worth a visit if you’re ever in London. xo Bryn